He professed to have obtained his information from the Duchess of Portsmouth, who, he said, always asserted, on the authority of Charles the Second, that the king his father was not beheaded by either Colonel Joyce or Colonel Pride, as was then commonly believed; but that the name of the real executioner was Gregory Brandon; that this man had worn a black crape stretched over his face, and had no sooner taken off the king’s head than he was put into a boat at Whitehall Stairs, together with the block, the black cloth that covered it, the axe, and every other article that had been stained with the royal blood. Being conveyed to the Tower, all the implements used in the decapitation had been immediately reduced to ashes. A purse, containing one hundred broad pieces of gold, was then delivered to Brandon, and he was dismissed. He survived the transaction many years; but divulged it a short time before he died. “This account,” Wraxall adds, “as coming from the Duchess of Portsmouth, challenges great respect.”
A curious miscellany, called the “Lounger’s Common Place Book,” published in 1793, a favourite work with Leigh Hunt, and often quoted by him in his “History of the Town,” adds to the stock of stories on the subject of Charles the First’s execution, an extract from a French work called “Délassements de l’Homme Sensible,” professing to be written by a Monsieur d’Arnaud. It will be as well perhaps to warn the reader at the outset that the Lounger is by no means an authority upon any subject, and that his appetite for the apocryphal is almost without bounds.
The Frenchman relates, according to the Lounger, that Lord Stair, once the favourite minister of King George the Second, retiring in disgust in consequence of some real or imaginary affront received after the battle of Dettingen, and on his way to Scotland, made a short stay in London to settle some regimental accounts, when an anonymous letter in a strange hand was sent to him, requesting that he would favour the writer with an interview at a particular time and place, as he had certain information of the most singular importance to communicate. Prompted by curiosity, and moved by the tone of entreaty of the letter, the Earl, taking some precautions to ensure his own safety, went to the place appointed. He knocked at the door of a corner house adjoining an obscure alley in a remote quarter of the town. He was admitted by a ragged and forlorn-looking wretch, who conducted him up a narrow tortuous staircase to a dingy garret, dimly lighted, in one corner of which he perceived the figure of a very old man stretched upon a narrow bed. His lordship was loaded with thanks for having condescended to comply with the request contained in the letter, which the old man avowed he had written. He offered many apologies for the trouble he had occasioned his lordship. He then made mention of many curious facts not generally known in connection with the Stair family, the Dalrymples, and finally inquired of the Earl whether he had not recently experienced much inconvenience from the want of certain title-deeds and conveyances relating to his paternal estates. His lordship admitted that such was the case, adding that for want of some particular documents he was in great danger of losing a large portion of his inheritance. The old man then pointed to a box which stood by his bedside, “There,” he said, “are the writings you require. You will ask how they came into my possession,—who I am? I have led a wandering and miserable life, strangely prolonged to one hundred and twenty-five years, and I now live to behold in you a lineal descendant from me in the third generation. The fame of your gallantry has reached me. I resolved to place in your hands the contents of that box. The wretched old man you see before you was a subject, a friend, and favourite of King Charles the First; but suspecting him of having wronged, most cruelly wronged, the woman I loved, my loyalty turned to hatred, an insatiable thirst for revenge possessed me. After his trial and deposition, I requested permission to be my sovereign’s executioner. This was granted to me. A moment before raising the fatal axe, I whispered in his ear the name of his victim and her avenger. But from the hour of the king’s death I have been a prey to the keenest remorse, an outcast and exile in different parts of Europe and Asia; and as though to increase my punishment, Heaven has seen fit to prolong my life far beyond the common age of man. Now leave me to my fate; ask me no more; forget that you have ever seen me.” Lord Stair quitted the house, to return the next day in the hope of rendering some assistance to the mysterious old man. He had disappeared, however; no trace of him could be discovered, and he was never heard of more.
M. d’Arnaud’s story is curious, but, of course, worthless from an historical point of view; it will not bear the test of the simplest critical analysis. The secret as to the executioner of King Charles has been well kept, probably from its being very little of a secret at all, and capable of a solution so simple, that people in such a case were rather inclined to avoid than accept it. It was no doubt difficult to credit that a prisoner so extraordinary should